7/15/2009 @ 6:00PM

Other Comments

To date, most of the $158 billion [stimulus] that has been made available has gone to state governments. And the bulk has gone to places like California, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey–blue states all. How are they doing with the taxpayers’ largesse?

According to a Government Accountability Office audit released [in July], the stimulus money has been used to ”cushion” state budgets, retain teachers, boost Medicaid payments and deal with a host of other short-term state ”emergencies.”

In short, almost everything but economic stimulus.

–Investor’s Business Daily

Nanny State

Eating is even more important than health care, so shouldn’t we have government-run supermarkets ”to keep the private ones honest”? After all, supermarkets clearly put profits ahead of feeding people. And we can’t run around naked, so we should have government-run clothing stores to keep the private ones honest. And shelter is just as important, so we should start public housing to keep private builders honest. Oops, we already have that. And that is exactly the point. Think of everything you know about public housing, the image the term conjures up in your mind. If you like public housing you will love public health care.

–George Newman, Wall Street Journal

Control Freaks

Beginning with FDR, wily statists justified the massive expansion of federal power under ever more elastic definitions of the commerce clause. For Obama-era control freaks, the environment and health care are the commerce clause supersized. They establish the pretext for the regulation of everything: If the government is obligated to cure you of illness, it has an interest in preventing you from getting ill in the first place–by regulating what you eat, how you live, the choices you make from the moment you get up in the morning. Likewise, if everything you do impacts ”the environment,” then the environment is an all-purpose umbrella for regulating everything you do. It’s the most convenient and romantic justification for what the title of Paul Rahe’s new book rightly identifies as ”soft despotism.”

The good news is that, at the G8 summit [in July], America’s allies would commit only to the fuzziest and most meaningless of environmental goals. Europe has been hit far harder by the economic downturn. When your unemployment rate is 17% (as in Spain), ”unsustainable growth” is no longer your most pressing problem. The environmental cult is itself a product of what [Prince Charles] calls the ”Age of Convenience”: It’s what you worry about when you don’t have to worry about jobs or falling house prices or collapsed retirement accounts. Today, as European prime ministers are beginning to figure out, a strategic goal of making things worse when they’re already worse is a much tougher sell.

–Mark Steyn, National Review

Luggage Lunacy

Anyone who has flown lately, especially on airlines that charge fat fees to check luggage, knows there are generally two kinds of travelers: those who schlep on the biggest carry-on bags they can get away with, and those who are annoyed by this. The first category includes the guy with a duffel bag as big as Montana that occupies almost an entire overhead bin and the woman with an immense roller bag she can’t lift (”would you mind?”) — and look out below if either bag happens to fall.

If there must be fees, why not charge for carry-ons and make checked baggage free? Remember how smooth security and boarding were immediately after the ban on liquids, when virtually everyone checked bags?

–USA Today

Going Once, Going Twice

President Obama has finally found a way to empty the Guantanamo Bay detention camp of terrorists: paying other countries to take them. Critics attacked President Bush for sending terrorists to Guantanamo. But no country offered to take them voluntarily. And members of Congress don’t want terrorists shipped to their states.

So the U.S. government will give the tiny Pacific island of Palau $200 million to take 17 of the least dangerous terrorists off our hands. That’s about $11 million per terrorist.

The Wall Street Journal says at that rate we could spend $615 billion emptying Gitmo–if anyone will take the others. If you thought locking up the terrorists was expensive, freeing them will likely cost a whole lot more.

–Merrill Matthews, Institute for Policy Innovation

Asleep at the Wheel

Investigators successfully smuggled bomb-making materials into 10 federal buildings, the Government Accountability Office reported. The exercise highlights weaknesses in the Federal Protective Service, which guards more than 1 million government employees in 9,000 buildings. The facilities tested by the GAO included congressional offices and buildings used by the Homeland Security, Justice and State departments.